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Harlem Renaissance

Where Music Truly Began

The Renaissance Fair is in town this week. It's a large fun carnival type event where every person can go and play games while they learn about the European Renaissance that happened several 100's of years ago. But what ever happened with the other Renaissances? Most of them were used to lay down several basic foundations for our society and then drifted off out of our memory. One such Renaissance was the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance created and influenced some of the greatest minds of the 20th century. Zora Neale Hurston was one of these great minds. She wrote several outstanding plays and novels and helped share the unspoken point of view of several thousands of people. Her works helped to remind us of how great an effect the Harlem Renaissance had on our history. The Harlem Renaissance incorporated new ideas and arts from the African American culture into the broader spectrum of American culture. Of these arts and artists were the distinguished Zora Neale Hurston, her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and one of the greatest musicians to ever have lived, Mr. Louis Armstrong.
As a child, Hurston was born on 1891 in Notalsuga, Alabama but quickly moved and spent the remainder of her childhood in Eatonville, Florida. When Hurston turned of the age 13, her mother passed away leaving her father with two options, raise her himself or send her off to private school. After a brief study at Howard University, Hurston spent the remainder of her college life at Barnard College where she earned her Bachelors of Arts degree in anthropology. Hurston's writing style was focused largely on her studies of anthropology where she focused upon the ethnography of the African American people. Ethnography is defined such as, "The ethnographer, in [James] Clifford's sense, rather than describing and attempting to explain ‘the unfamiliar,' reexamines assumptions about ‘the familiar' (Hill 36). Hurston understood...